NationStates Jolt Archive

http://www.kerryoniraq.com/

John Kerry knows what to do when it comes to Iraq better than George Bush, right? Well, that's because he's hit on the issue every way somebody could!

Oh, let's see, shall we sit back, consider our options, and change our minds if we get new information saying we're wrong... or should we sit up and act unilaterally against a country that presented no threat to us?

Paid for by the Republican National Committee Not Authorized By Any Candidate Or Candidate Committee.

Uh huh ...

YOU do know he is being misquoted in his explaination.
He voted For the war when he was told we were paying for by using Iraqi Oil funds, remember this? The lie The Asminsitration told us, guess what they decided not to.
He voted Against the war when we were using our hard earned money for the war, bringing us more in debt.

You see the Senate and House do that they make a different version or attack a bad document to the back to get it passed through that normally couldn't.

That video is a load of bs if it quotes that. Conservatives try to show the world as black and white but there are yellow, red, and brown people too.

"If the UN fails to cooperate, ‘we always reserve the right to do what we need to do to protect our security,’ Kerry said." (Susan Milligan, "Confronting Iraq," The Boston Globe, 10/4/02)

"George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him." (ABC News Democrat Presidential Candidates Debate, Columbia, SC, 5/3/03)

"I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq ..." (Sen. John Kerry, Speech To The 2002 DLC National Conversation, New York, NY, 7/29/02)

Oh, let's see, shall we sit back, consider our options, and change our minds if we get new information saying we're wrong... or should we sit up and act unilaterally against a country that presented no threat to us?
Act without sanction of the UN (Far from unilateral) against a country that presented no threat to us. We should do the same in Sudan right now.

After seeing that, I'm definitely not voting for Kerry!

Let's at least put those quotes in the proper temporal context:

"If the UN fails to cooperate, ‘we always reserve the right to do what we need to do to protect our security,’ Kerry said." (Susan Milligan, "Confronting Iraq," The Boston Globe, 10/4/02)


The UN WAS cooperating in October of 2002. They asked for the inspections to be allowed to be completed. They were asking for a few months. GW decided that taking advantage of a period of favourable weather for an invasion was the better option as he could not bear to put it off for six months.


"George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him." (ABC News Democrat Presidential Candidates Debate, Columbia, SC, 5/3/03)


Of course, at this point it was not yet confirmed that Saddam didn't really NEED disarming. At this point the US inspectors were still searching for the expected hidden stockpiles. And at this point Kerry still belived the administration's BS version of "intelligence". But note that right from the start he is chiding GW for not having pursued other options more fully. At this point, you are actually pointing out the consistency of his viewpoint.

"I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq ..." (Sen. John Kerry, Speech To The 2002 DLC National Conversation, New York, NY, 7/29/02)

A goal of regime change does not neccessarily imply that war is the only way to bring that about. He supported that ideal under Clinton as well - but none of them felt that invasion was the best alternative.


But, as long as we are throwing out quotes:

By Colin Powell
We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.


How did he go from not having WMD capability and not even having the conventional army left to even threaten a neeighbour to being a threat to stability in the region, and a direct threat to the US?

Sourced right from the State Department: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm

Let's at least put those quotes in the proper temporal context:



The UN WAS cooperating in October of 2002. They asked for the inspections to be allowed to be completed. They were asking for a few months. GW decided that taking advantage of a period of favourable weather for an invasion was the better option as he could not bear to put it off for six months.




Of course, at this point it was not yet confirmed that Saddam didn't really NEED disarming. At this point the US inspectors were still searching for the expected hidden stockpiles. And at this point Kerry still belived the administration's BS version of "intelligence". But note that right from the start he is chiding GW for not having pursued other options more fully. At this point, you are actually pointing out the consistency of his viewpoint.



A goal of regime change does not neccessarily imply that war is the only way to bring that about. He supported that ideal under Clinton as well - but none of them felt that invasion was the best alternative.


But, as long as we are throwing out quotes:

By Colin Powell


How did he go from not having WMD capability and not even having the conventional army left to even threaten a neeighbour to being a threat to stability in the region, and a direct threat to the US?

Sourced right from the State Department: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm

Why can you defend Kerry's statements, but are so quick to call Bush a liar and not taking any explanations?

Why can you defend Kerry's statements, but are so quick to call Bush a liar and not taking any explanations?

Well, thos two are two seperate things. People look at a list of quotes and read them in the context asif theywere said today with everything people know today. I feel that it is fairer to at least consider them in the context of when they were made. As for GW, I could go into the same long-winded explanation for the thousandth time. But nowadays I just point people to read this:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0804-11.htm

CommonDreams IS indeed a liberal-leaning site, but if you note the sources for all of the quotes and statements in this article you will find they link back to credible news sources (ABC, NBC, CNN, Government sites) so you can even see the full context of the quotes listed.

Enjoy the reading.

Incidentally, how do you reconcile that quote I gave by Colin Powel in '01 as compared to the "grave and gathering threat" that Saddam became just a year later?

Saddam was no threat. He never was. And Colin Powell knew it.

Remember his speech at the UN?

The LA Times got hold of a leaked copy of the CIA's vetting of that speech. Youcan read it here: http://images.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2004-07/13418408.pdf

Almost every single point he was claiming they "knew" the CIA called "weak".

Even the Senate Intelligence Committees report (available here:http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf) made mincemeat of that speech, and regarding Bush on page 490 of that report is the following passage:

Bad intelligence and bad policy decisions are not mutually exclusive - that is, both can exist simultaneously yet quite independant of each other in the same situation. This is true of the US march to war against Iraq. The Bush Administration used the Intelligence Community's poor intelligence on Iraq's WMD programs to support it's decision to go to war, but just as the Intelligence Community's conclusions were more definte that the information warranted, the urgency expressed by Bush and members of his administration was unsupported even by the faulty intelligence. The Bush Administration compounded the failure of the Intelligence Community by exaggerating the Community's conclusions to the public - an inappropriate course of action that could have occured even had the intelligence been sound.

The Committee's second phase of it's review will hopefully delve more deeply into this issue and detail how policymakers public statements on Iraq's threat to the US did not match the classified intelligence analysis.




Please do not mistake me for a knee-jerk democrat supporter. I'm not. My opinions are arrived at after a lot of research. I do not disparage other people arriving at diferent conclusions from available evidence and enjoy a lively debate with anyone who can make a cogent argument, but please accept that I do not make hasty decisions nor do I just spout the party line.

-Z-